Ryan Gordon | Tech & Engineering

It’s been well over a year since my last update. I apologize for that but in between school, life, and some really fun projects, I have some really promising progress to share.

On my last update for the Kinect, I left off with some LabView code that allows anyone to interface with the Kinect. In the time since it was released I have received lots of positive feedback from everyone, so I must first start out by thanking everyone and I hope it will continue to be of good use.

Since that time I worked furiously to develop an image processing algorithm to detect open doors/pathways enabling artificial intelligence pathway planning.

The only issue is in order to actually run the software on the iRobot create I bought to test it on, i had to either tether or set my entire laptop on the iRobot create. That isn’t an optimal solution especially for debugging purposes. Hence, the next step would be to design my own circuitry to resolve the problem.

Now, approximately 6 months ago, my good friend Gytis Baranauskas and myself bought ourselves a DIY CNC machine. While we have had many ideas and goals for the CNC machine, our primary goal was to create printed circuit boards. This would enable us to offload the USB host controller, the iRobot communication and the image processing into separate microprocessors and achieve a much smaller, lighter, cheaper solution then using a full-blown computer and all the complexities that come with dealing with supporting 10 different operating systems.

Our first experiments are consisting of creating PCB breakout boards for the USB host controller and a microprocessor in order to connect them to a breadboard and begin testing them and the functionality to use them.

We are making progress rapidly, and I will keep this site informed as our progress continues.